When one has a laptop but no Internet access at home, finding places to connect to the Internet to check email and surf the web (i.e. if you don’t have a web enabled mobile phone) then becomes another part of your adjustment to life in New Zealand.

Unlike in the US where there are plenty of coffee shops that offer free wireless, and a few that actually make you buy coffee before they grant you access, here it seems those are more in the minority. In addition to this, the access provided in most of those coffee shops are restricted in either the amount of time you can use the access, the amount of data you can download and/or the types of data or files you can download.

To be fair, some of these restrictions are not unusual even in coffee shops in the Seattle area. For example, Fremont Coffee Company, located in the Fremont area requires you to buy coffee before they will give you a voucher with you time limited username and password. Some places like Victrola Coffee on 15th Avenue on upper Capital Hill turns off their Wi-Fi on certain days and at certain times to prevent ‘squatters’ who buy one cup of drip and hang out there the whole day on their laptops thus depriving others a place to seat and enjoy their espresso.. Starbucks had a deal with T-Mobile where one would set up an account for access. They also had a deal where you bought a Starbucks coffee card and somehow through that you could get some sort of Internet access but since I don’t really go to Starbucks to hang out, I never really tried to use their Internet access offerings.

However from the little I have seen so far Internet access is pretty much restricted in some form or the other I have yet to see one coffee shop, of the few that provide access, where you can hang out to your hearts content and download Gigs of iTunes trailers and podcasts. Here is a quick summary of what I have seen so far at three coffee shops;

The first coffee shop/café I used to get Internet access was one called Perretts Cafe. This I think had the most stable of the three. It was relatively easy to connect one the barista gave me the username and password. What in interesting is that I don’t think they actually change the password, nor do they generate multiple usernames which means that once you’ve been there, you can probably hang out somewhere close and access the web without having to pay for coffee or eats. Now the problem I had with this place was that they do restrict the types of files you can download. This includes executables… and that makes sense since you don’t want folks downloading shady binaries via your network. The problem though was that they were garbling my anti-virus definitions files so I couldn’t do any windows system or security updates at all.

Enigma is a great little coffee and lounge on Courtney Place. This is the only one that seems to have no real restrictions as far as I can tell. Part of the reason I really can’t tell however is because it also the slowest and the least stable of the three. To actually be able to get connected, I was told that I had to sit at this particular spot right by the pinball machine… at first I thought she was joking and then one of the other baristas I asked also told me the exact same thing. Regardless, though I was able to connect, the connection and the speed were actually pretty bad.

Of late I have been going to Esquires Coffee for two reasons. First, they actually make good coffee considering they are a chain of not very ‘barista’ looking folks. Second, if you ask, they will give you a voucher for an hour or 60 MB of Internet access, whichever comes first. The Internet provider is a company called TimeZone. In my opinion this is still a good deal I think because you are getting your favorite espresso drink, and they will throw in some ‘free’ Wi-Fi to boot. Now of course there is a bit of a problem in the you get one hour or 60 MB which means that if you were downloading some of your favorite iTunes podcasts or doing your system updates, you might only be there for a couple of minutes. The other problem I was having the last couple of times I used them is that the there were a couple of times when I lost connects to the Internet or the Internet was extremely slow. I would click on a link then wait and wait. But for the most part they are ok.

TimeZone also provide Internet access for Starbucks. We actually went into one of the Starbucks and asked about their Internet access. They told us that Internet access cost $3.00 and no mention of buy coffee and get it free so rather than hang around and ask clarifying questions, we went to Esquires instead.

There is another service called CaféNET that is similar to TimeZone where the company provides Internet access to various eating establishments around the city. This includes Clark’s Café at the Wellington Library. They offer a number of access options but as far as I can see they don’t have vouchers meaning that you have to use your credit card to purchase time.

There are two other options available at the library. Supposedly there is Woosh but I couldn’t get a signal, then there is Telecom who offer access at $9.95 per hour compared to caféNET’s $10 for 24 consecutive hours. I’m sorry but this is exactly the problem I have with these dinosaurs. Why would I opt to pay $10 for an hour of access when I can pay the same for 24 hours of access? This to me is a classic example why no country needs these government monopolies (or former monopolies)!

In general, I think the difference between Seattle and Wellington however is that fundamentally; Internet access is on the whole much cheaper and more pervasive in Seattle than it is here in Wellington. It feels like Seattle was maybe six to eight years ago when Internet access was a little harder to some by and more expensive. But what helped Seattle and this something that I don’t really see here yet is that Seattle had/has a ton of people with laptops so there is much more demand for Wi-Fi be it at home or at coffee shops. Here I really don’t get the sense that a lot of the locals here lug their laptops with them everywhere they go. So as a result what you find that there is less demand for Wi-Fi from locals. At the same time it almost feels like many of those you see with laptops are tourists and travelers. Oh by the way, MacBooks and Accer netbooks seem to be really popular.

And I have to admit, being that I am new to this city, I have barely just began touching the surface with regards to coffee and coffee culture in Wellington… and so this is a topic I will be coming back to again and again as I continue to explore coffee culture here in New Zealand.

This post has been a long time coming. For a while now, I have been looking forward to checking out the coffee culture in New Zealand. Part of the reason for this is because word on the street is that espresso is huge deal here. But little did I know what I was in for! I sit here writing this post in a small café called Enigma enjoying some of the best espresso I have ever tasted. Yesterday I was at a café called Ernesto right on Cuba St in the Cuba district of Wellington. The coffee there was also pretty amazing! In fact their coffee is from a local roasting company called Havana Coffee Works. I first read about the owners of this company a few months ago in Idealog and about how Havana Coffee Works came to be. I will be writing more about Havana Coffee Works in a later post. But my main point here is that I have been enjoying some great coffee here in Wellington and also in Auckland.

Though I had heard that Wellington, New Zealand had quite a bit of a coffee culture, little did I know how seriously Wellingtonians and Aucklanders take their coffee? Just about everywhere you go, the coffee shops, the cafes, the bakeries, the restaurants all seem to do a pretty amazing job with coffee. There are also quite a few espresso stands, espresso carts and trailers (kind of like the Skillet for those of you from Seattle). It is interesting for me to note that many folk here will order espresso drinks to do with their meals rather than just scones or other sweets as I am more used to. And since just about every café here serves hand pulled espresso drinks, I would venture to say that Wellington probably has way more espresso serving places per capita than Seattle… but this is just my own unscientific observation. But even at both the Auckland and Wellington airports, I counted more than six coffee shop/cafes at each airport…. and this was not after exploring the whole airport, but just checking out the in the sections I happened to be in.

A short while ago, friend of mine from Seattle, who flies in and out of New Zealand on business pretty regularly, recently told me something interesting about the coffee in New Zealand. He said, and I quote,” I have never had bad coffee in New Zealand.” As we continued to chat, when he was basically saying and I paraphrase is that you can’t get bad coffee in New Zealand. Yes I know this is hyperbole so please don’t write to me pointing out the fact that this is probably a false statement. But one thing I have to admit though that in the few days that I have been here I have yet to have one bad espresso drink. Even at the Auckland airport, where I first drink my first official New Zealand coffee, my latte or as they call it here, flat white, was pretty good actually (by the way, they do have flat whites and café lattes and I am still trying to figure out the difference between the two). I say this remembering the awful, awful latte I ordered from the Seattle’s Best Coffee stand at SeaTac airport this past August when I was about to catch my flight to Amsterdam. Now I know someone is going to get offended and write to tell me that they have had bad coffee in New Zealand, and that may be the case. I can also tell you that if I do find a place here with bad coffee, I will certainly do the write-up. And there are tons of places here to try out and review, which I will… with the places I have check out already, so far, so good…

So if coffee is so big in New Zealand, then how is it that you really don’t hear about it much as you would with Seattle coffee or even European coffee like in Italy? From the little I have been reading about New Zealand culture in magazines like Idealog is that New Zealanders (or Kiwis) are not really known for promoting themselves. They tend to be more laid back and not as aggressive about promoting themselves as you find American or even European businesses. But this I feel will probably change in the near future as some in New Zealand realize that in the global economy, self branding and promotion is essential… and I suspect this will eventually trickle down to the coffee industry and culture…

Anyway these are my first impressions in a country of in which I have been present for less than a week and will be here for a few years to come… and so I will certainly be doing a lot of sampling and exploring of the coffee scene here in New Zealand and especially in Wellington.

In the meantime you may be wondering what the Ground Offerings blog is going to be doing about posting articles on Seattle coffee culture? That will continue to happen via our Seattle based bloggers. In addition, we will be posting regularly on coffee culture around the world. If you are interested in coffee and would like to write for Ground Offerings, please let us know via the Contact Us link above.